If identity is a question of language, the narrator of Uncle Rudolf is irremediably cloven. In an exquisitely composed novel of doubleness, dubiety and prolonged protective silences, the Romanian refugee Andrei/ Andrew is condemned to cross and recross the border between identities.

On February 23 1937, little Andrei Petrescu disembarks in London as Andrew Peterson and becomes his own Doppelgänger. That threshold is marked by the exotic, tender and refined figure of his Uncle Rudolf: "You will be Andrew, Andrei. Andrew. For all the time you are in my care."

Even in this baptismal moment, we hear "Andrew Andrei Andrew" as a blurred chant, robbing each name of definition and authority. The threshold between twin names and languages is reproduced in the slippage between consciousness and dream. For in the bosom of his uncle's care, Andrew dreams recurrently and terribly in his mother tongue. He experiences the scene of his murdered mother's stigmatisation as the Jewish "debt-collector's daughter" in sleeps that are watched over by his uncle, himself a figure of exile, whose generosity, elegance and musicianship exist above an abyss of loss.

It is Bailey's triumph to show a pan-European catastrophe through an ironic technique of miniaturism and understatement that aestheticises mass terror, while indicating the unfathomable depths of human bestiality over which language is a veneer.

The novel is suffused with a kind of fastidious tenderness, emanating from Uncle Rudolf. A heroic opera singer reduced to operetta vulgarities, Rudolf, seen through Andrew's young gaze, is himself cloven. There is a certain sentimentalisation of the figure of Rudolf, the aesthete, faintly camp, often betraying the odour of misogyny: but this concentrates in Rudolf a maternal tenderness that renders him a substitute not solely for Andrew's father, but, more deeply, for his mother.

With aching beauty the author reveals the submerged sexual link between uncle and nephew. Andrew/Andrei can never love a woman; he cannot even bond to a person of his own generation. The sexualisation of the relationship, with its intimation of incest, is rendered with urbane and poignant restraint. That Rudolf is for Andrew the sum of all tender and desirable beauty is the tragic penalty he pays for the grace of his uncle's intervention in his destiny.

The "old language", buried in the unconscious mind, turns out to contain the seeds of forbidden homoeroticism. As Rudolf takes leave of this world, he re-enters the territory of the mother tongue and calls his nephew Andrei. Andrei in old age retreats to Bucharest to compose his circuitous memoir. The recidivist and deathwards tendency of the novel homes to origins and, in its closing chords, abdicates the schismatic world of words altogether: "I have the warmth of the dead in which to bask."

· Stevie Davies's novel The Element of Water is published by the Women's Press